AFRICA’S GREAT CIVILIZATIONS
COMMERCE AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS
THURSDAY, MARCH 2 @ 11:00PM
In the series’ final hour, host Henry Louis Gates, Jr. brings the story of “Africa’s Great Civilizations” into the nineteenth century, when a fierce competition for resources and trade stimulated ingenuity, while also enticing European powers and inciting conflicts that would threaten the stability and wellbeing of the continent. Gates begins his journey along South Africa’s eastern coast, where, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the legendary warrior Shaka Zulu transformed a chiefdom into the feared Zulu empire, seizing territory with intensely trained, disciplined regiments of soldiers, amabutho, and deploying those regiments in new, close-combat battlefield formations with a formidable new weapon, a short, stabbing spear. It was an era of tumultuous change on the continent, known as the Mfecane, when African kingdoms felt the squeeze of their rivals, no less encroaching foreign traders, and conflict and environmental challenges disrupted borders and displaced populations.
